In a lot of ways I'm surprised that other people, including the professor himself, are surprised by this. That is absolutely, emphatically not my way of saying "well obviously, wokeness is out of...
Exemplary
In a lot of ways I'm surprised that other people, including the professor himself, are surprised by this. That is absolutely, emphatically not my way of saying "well obviously, wokeness is out of control" - I'm saying I don't think the underlying drivers are specifically related to leftism, or being woke, or even anti-racism at all, despite that all being important context for this example in isolation.
People are competitive. Socially, financially, often even physically. Competitiveness leads to advantage-seeking. Any form of power, tool, social standing, status, or resource available to one group but not others can and will be turned to a competitive advantage by at least some members of that group, at least some of the time.
None of that is inherently a good or a bad thing on its own, nor does it do anything to address the complex interplay of advantages and disadvantages experienced differently by each individual, group, and society, but I hope that as a starting point it's something most of us can agree on.
Every step beyond that becomes fuzzier and less well defined, but I think it's fairly uncontroversial to observe that a decently large percentage of people will accept advantages more or less uncritically if they're offered, and that some much smaller percentage of people will actively and aggressively seek out any available advantages, sometimes at the expense of others. This still doesn't need to tie to any specific situation, or cast any value judgment on whether a given advantage is or isn't fair, or necessary, or deserved, or being used in the interests of the greater good - it's just high level observation.
Bringing it back to the concrete, you have Telluride choosing to center black voices in what looks to be a genuine and positive attempt to correct for previous wrongs. You have the author, planning to make use of this platform in the interests of education and equality. You have Keisha, who chooses to take advantage of the status and insulation that the platform provides her in order to dominate the conversation and bolster her own social and academic standing, and to find and amplify her supporters - I don't think it's possible to know whether she does this cynically for her own ends, or entirely unknowingly, or knowingly but through a genuine belief that it's necessary. You have the students, swept along by a charismatic authority figure and captured by the sense of righteousness she provides them.
I know this is reductive, and deliberately so in some ways. But I really do think it all just boils down to power dynamics, and those dynamics can arise from genuinely well-intentioned and initially positive movements just as much as they can from purposefully exclusionary and damaging ones.
[Edit] Since this seems to have ended up at the top of a very controversial topic, I want to reiterate that I really am saying that I believe the issue of power dynamics and people misusing them is totally separate to underlying ideology. It's a problem that can exist regardless of the surrounding context, and doesn't necessarily imply anything about that context. I see the two things as orthogonal, and for me that means that trying to make inferences about the ideology based on the group dynamics, or vice versa, is often misleading and sometimes even dangerous.
I absolutely don't mean this as a "call out" of anyone else in the thread, even those I disagree with. I'm genuinely pleased to be in a place we can discuss something like this with nuance and consideration, especially where people clearly have differing opinions about it. It's just important to me that I'm clear about what I'm saying, and the limits around the conclusions I personally would draw from that.
A pet theory of mine is that the ultra-left is struggling with assuming a position of relative power in a few key niches: University campuses, certain city neighborhoods, branches of the media (if...
A pet theory of mine is that the ultra-left is struggling with assuming a position of relative power in a few key niches: University campuses, certain city neighborhoods, branches of the media (if worth mentioning: not society as a whole). I recognize the MO of angrily shouting slogans from previous decades but the difference was that these calls came from a position of being genuinely oppressed and underrepresented. It used to be a way to compensate for a lack of a voice in higher up circles and it felt appropriate.
Now we have the same tone, the same tactic, but with the support of, say, university leadership. "Demands" that used to be symbolic and viewed in the context of not actually being achievable are now actually executed. Within hours. What used to be abstract criticism of the status-quo which could be examined and reflected upon is now made reality and nobody stops to check the practical ramifications.
Maybe some of these demands used to be ignored because of racism but a few might have had genuinely justifiable opposition. People like Keisha are too excited about finally enacting their agenda and do not bother to distinguish between the two.
I often think about the cycle of oppression where the oppressed become the oppressors: The oppressed and the oppressors share the same society as well as the same tools, methodologies, and...
I often think about the cycle of oppression where the oppressed become the oppressors:
Freire warns the oppressed against becoming oppressors on two counts: (1) whether the oppressed gain power and use this power to oppress their previous oppressor; or (2) in the case of the oppressed gaining power over other oppressed people and becoming their oppressors, as they seek their own individual liberation. The danger of a previously oppressed person becoming an oppressor is due to their ambiguous duality. Freire points out that the oppressed are at one and the same time both themselves (the oppressed) and the oppressor, whose consciousness they have internalized. Due to this ambiguous duality and the internalization of their oppressors, the oppressed seek to become like the oppressors and share in their way of life.
The oppressed and the oppressors share the same society as well as the same tools, methodologies, and paradigms to oppress and to liberate, to fight — limited by their contemporary imagination. I observe that meaningful progress happens when new tools are innovated and introduced. The most famous is the innovation of peaceful civil disobedience in our political language, as deployed and normalized by Gandhi and King. Before the 1900s, violent disobedience was the common language, spoken in the form of rebellions, revolts, uprisings. Nowadays, we protest.
There are many dynamics at work in the professor's case. From my own personal experience, I've met narcissists and abusers who dress themselves in the language of righteousness because it allows them to dominate and abuse others and enjoy the thrill and ecstasy of power that they otherwise couldn't access. From the professor's description of her, Keisha seems to be such a person. The type is found among both activists (the derided Social Justice Warrior) and the religious (the scolding Fundamentalist).
But among the ultra-left, the tools they instinctively and unquestioningly deploy in their fight against racism are the ones their oppressors used and now are so familiar and seemingly obvious to them: discrimination (but in reverse), segregation, censure, ostracism, and so on.
I believe that this fundamentally drives the phenomenon of Horseshoe Theory: in the end, the far left and right are cast from the same steel.
Horseshoe theory was never meant to describe political attitudes. Horseshoe makes the classic mistake of confusing economic policy with social in an attempt to oversimplify and classify...
I believe that this fundamentally drives the phenomenon of Horseshoe Theory: in the end, the far left and right are cast from the same steel.
Horseshoe theory was never meant to describe political attitudes. Horseshoe makes the classic mistake of confusing economic policy with social in an attempt to oversimplify and classify individuals. Perhaps most importantly, there's exceedingly little scientific study of horseshoe theory and what little is out there happens to fail to prove the horseshoe theory hypothesis.
You're correct to point out that there are bad apples in any group. I also think you are correct to note that discrimination is still discrimination, even when it's employed in fundamentally different ways (a point you recognize explicitly in your parenthetical explanation of discrimination). A far-left narcissist might hold very different beliefs and employ very different tools than a far-right narcissist, but ultimately they are both still narcissists. What this implies, however, is not that the far-left and far-right are similar to each other (an artifact of attempting to infer rather than deduce), but rather that narcissists are similar to each other.
This is spot on my friend. I have been thinking this for a long time but didn’t know if I could voice this without being labeled bigot or worse. A lot of these movements are indeed using the same...
This is spot on my friend. I have been thinking this for a long time but didn’t know if I could voice this without being labeled bigot or worse. A lot of these movements are indeed using the same weapons they declare that their oppressors are using, on both sides.
Yeeesh. I don’t want to draw too much from just one side of a story. I’m sure this Keisha has her own perspective on it. But this is pretty damning and it’s hard to read her behavior as anything...
Yeeesh. I don’t want to draw too much from just one side of a story. I’m sure this Keisha has her own perspective on it. But this is pretty damning and it’s hard to read her behavior as anything other than a dark triad personality having found a framework for laundering abusive and self-serving behaviors as part of a fight for “justice.”
This quote really sums up how much intellectual harm has actually been done to these students.
Keisha is uniquely talented at performing her role, but she isn’t the author of the play. Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse: Pathological relationships that cut us off from the world, from the give-and-take of reasons and feelings unfolding over time that makes up life in the world. We see this crystal clear in the paradoxes that I encountered: The experience was supposed to be organized around a “transformative justice,” rather than a punitive model, yet the community managed to expel two of its members. Students continually voiced their desire to find practical actions to help change the world, but after four weeks, they had learned to say that anti-blackness is so foundational, the world could never change. The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all, but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.
You can feel his pain reading that. He went in hoping to train a cadre of thoughtful, activist leaders on a subject important to him. He instead got to watch them being thoroughly disillusioned. It’s hard to imagine what the upshot of even having such a jaundiced worldview like that is. It’s like being angry and miserable is the point. And the goal is just spread around this fatalism and anger and hopelessness as much as possible. There’s no hope for a better world here. It’s not a “progressive” worldview in the slightest. That sort of mentality of permanent siege and fearfulness of the world is a hallmark of being a reactionary.
The section on commitment to democracy enabling abuse I found interesting. It really stresses the point that democratic governance is really about norms and virtues, merely having the formal act of people voting on things isn’t really the meaningful thing that makes the system work or reach toward any sort of rational or just outcome. As in this case (and in the nation’s politics writ large) we’ve seen ways specific democratic norms have been gamed out to enable demagoguery and corruption. People are kind of aping the formalities and rituals of the thing without really caring about the thing.
(I'm reluctant to post this since it's hard to see the discussion going well, but it seems like a cautionary tale that should be shared. Maybe not generalized too broadly though? It's a story of a...
(I'm reluctant to post this since it's hard to see the discussion going well, but it seems like a cautionary tale that should be shared. Maybe not generalized too broadly though? It's a story of a particular place and time.)
From the article:
This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.
Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?
Further evidence in case you wonder if he's really on the left: here's a book review he wrote.
This comment is not an invitation for debate. This comment is about emotions. I am a black man that is profoundly leftist and anti-racist. I was a student at a university at the graduate level...
This comment is not an invitation for debate. This comment is about emotions.
I am a black man that is profoundly leftist and anti-racist. I was a student at a university at the graduate level that was largely black, leftist, and anti-racist. I do not have the means or the inclination to evaluate the veracity of the facts in the article, but that would be a difficult read even if it was fiction. It reverberates so much with my memories of that period. I am, at this moment, scared to write this comment. I'm not writing this as a top comment because I'm scared of the responses it might bring. I do not want to debate something that brings so many sad and conflicted emotions. And that is a problem. Because I should debate it. Everyone should debate it.
There is such a thing as exhaustion from activism. I'm not black but maybe I can relate a little bit? Because as an LGBT+ person, I used to engage in a lot of debates and discussions online. I...
There is such a thing as exhaustion from activism.
I'm not black but maybe I can relate a little bit? Because as an LGBT+ person, I used to engage in a lot of debates and discussions online. I haven't for a while, and a mere headline about me and my queer siblings is enough to make me just quickly move on and scroll to the next thing. I am just so tired and sick of it. I've become disillusioned that I will ever change anybody's minds about these things, especially online.
I no longer care to sacrifice my mental well-being. It's too much to ask of some people, but I just want to live my life in peace god dammit.
Edit: after hitting send I realise I may have missed the point entirely - I apologise
This is such a familiar tale. :/ And I feel like even on Tildes, we've had this discussion several times before. When it's not about this exact topic, it's about some other form of issue that...
This is such a familiar tale. :/
And I feel like even on Tildes, we've had this discussion several times before. When it's not about this exact topic, it's about some other form of issue that rejects nuance.
Personal perspective...
Racism specifically in its simplest forms is an issue I've been lucky enough to not suffer from directly, but I've had my share of -ist shit to deal with and I tend to do what I think a lot of people do: generalize my experience to put myself in the shoes of others. I don't pretend to know, but I try to do my best. I fight for others as I would for myself; more if possible.
And I feel that exhaustion. I've long since stopped calling myself "leftist" despite strongly identifying with it. In fact, I stopped calling myself most things I did identify with in the past: Leftist, Atheist, Gamer, French, Activist, ... Between feeling like my life is more nuanced than bucketed, and feeling targeted for shit I do not adhere to, it's felt like the easiest way to stop having targets painted on my back. There are very, very few adjectives/groups I even apply to myself anymore.
Incidentally, not being part of those groups has allowed my viewpoints to evolve without feeling like I am betraying my core principles. When I stopped calling myself atheist, I found myself again as an agnostic. When I stopped trying to bucket my sexuality, I found that it was flexible and I didn't need to define it to be happy. When I stopped calling myself leftist, I found my political viewpoints were actually all over the place and I don't really care to have political opinions about things I haven't developed an understanding for.
People really, really want to bucket, though. "You're not on the left? You must be on the right, then". I don't know what it is; I think it's something about american politics that just did this. Maybe just the electoral system the US developed which means that you straight up have to vote "right" or "left". If one wing is pro-something, the other wing is anti-that-thing. And if you're anti-that-thing, you're on the other wing, PERIOD. The politicians themselves know this and the more experienced ones play it to their full advantage of course (in fact, Biden's latest speech to congress showcases this perfectly, many soundbites were had).
This... permeates to other countries. Back in my home country, I fear Marine Le Pen will win the next elections and there is nothing I can do about it. While not the sole cause, American left-wing extremism (or even not-so-extremism) has entirely played its role in that, driving people to online bubbles that welcome the "refugees without a political identity", for theirs has been rejected by the left. Those communities and bubbles slowly infiltrate other countries; fighting for issues that don't even apply to the new country they got translated into, but who cares, it's about emotions, not facts, so they grow.
Internet politics is a fucking battleground of marketing campaigns. So, remind me again, what the point is to call myself a "leftist"?
As an Indian American I feel this pretty hard as well. A lot of the political discourse in India is dominated by people who seem extremely conditioned by American political framings of...
This... permeates to other countries. Back in my home country, I fear Marine Le Pen will win the next elections and there is nothing I can do about it. While not the sole cause, American left-wing extremism (or even not-so-extremism) has entirely played its role in that, driving people to online bubbles that welcome the "refugees without a political identity", for theirs has been rejected by the left. Those communities and bubbles slowly infiltrate other countries; fighting for issues that don't even apply to the new country they got translated into, but who cares, it's about emotions, not facts, so they grow.
As an Indian American I feel this pretty hard as well. A lot of the political discourse in India is dominated by people who seem extremely conditioned by American political framings of majority/minority discourse. So much so that I’ve actually seen people unironically talk about the history of “Hindu supremacy” oppressing Muslim minorities in India with the same framing as White supremacy over indigenous and Black people in the US. It’s bizarre when Indian history was actually the opposite! Where the Hindus were the indigenous population that Muslim invaders attempted (and failed) to supplant.
Obviously that doesn’t mean it’s okay for Hindus to oppress Muslims now that the shoe is on the other foot, but it certainly doesn’t do much to advance communal harmony when the ostensibly “liberal” and “progressive” groups are telling outright lies and classing anyone pointing out these are lies as a bigot. But it’s like the narrative itself, and the imperative of reinforcing it, has become more important than just having an accurate understanding of how the world is.
I think part of how research works online may be to blame. I might have talked about it before, but in the days of library research if you wanted to learn something specific about a topic you had to become familiar with the general facts on the topic because your main sources were various books and encyclopedias articles. Encountering a broad survey of perspectives on specific issues was mostly inescapable unless you were specifically in an ideological reading group that was filtering you down to ideologically focused literature.
But when people google for all their research, they search for specific articles of evidence (not even arguments) about the subject without absorbing all the necessary context. You get these random snippets of claims off TikTok or Twitter or various memes from wherever. But it’s all caricatured and exaggerated forms of the core idea and if that’s your primary means of learning about history or philosophy or politics your ideas on how the world works will be a distorted, funhouse mirror view of reality.
It occurs to me that this is extremely similar to the concept that the next generation of LLMs is going to be trained on the regurgitated results of the previous generation's LLM and the quality...
You get these random snippets of claims off TikTok or Twitter or various memes from wherever. But it’s all caricatured and exaggerated forms of the core idea
It occurs to me that this is extremely similar to the concept that the next generation of LLMs is going to be trained on the regurgitated results of the previous generation's LLM and the quality of the output will decrease over time as AI output becomes its primary input as well.
In both cases, the main question is: How do you create (or even just identify) high quality content, and have the SNR increase over time, rather than decrease?
You’d need really good curation and conditioning of your training data, but at that point you’re just hiring a subject matter expert on the issue of interest anyway and might as well have them...
You’d need really good curation and conditioning of your training data, but at that point you’re just hiring a subject matter expert on the issue of interest anyway and might as well have them write it.
I appreciate your view, and I agree with you to a point. People should come to ideas and join groups based on them. They shouldn’t adopt ideas with the purpose of joining a group. That’s just...
I appreciate your view, and I agree with you to a point. People should come to ideas and join groups based on them. They shouldn’t adopt ideas with the purpose of joining a group. That’s just plain backwards. I would much rather have allies who agree with me because they understand and agree with my ideas, and not people who agree with my ideas just to fit in with the people around me.
But I don’t think that it’s pointless to give yourself these labels because those are the means with which you attract the people who think like you, so it is still a useful tool.
Why would I want to attract people like me, though? Variety is how we create; otherwise we do exactly what @Naravara mentions above: regurgitate until our output is a digestion of a digestion....
Why would I want to attract people like me, though?
Variety is how we create; otherwise we do exactly what @Naravara mentions above: regurgitate until our output is a digestion of a digestion.
This thread has really inspired me to write about this. I think I will try to share something in the coming days.
They will need to be like you along certain dimensions though, just so when you do disagree there is a given set of shared values, experiences, and assumptions you're coming in with. For example,...
Why would I want to attract people like me, though?
They will need to be like you along certain dimensions though, just so when you do disagree there is a given set of shared values, experiences, and assumptions you're coming in with.
For example, if I'm interested in discussion personal religious matters I want to talk to other Hindus. I don't want to be in generic "religion" spaces that are mostly populated with Christians and Muslims because they're coming from a completely different paradigm for how to understand these things. If you're LGBTQ you don't want to spend all your time retreading the foundational basics, you want to be able to go deep or vent or talk about things with people who get the foundational concepts and shared experiences to be able to do more than just skim the surface of your frustrations with you.
I've been with my wife for over 10 years now, and while I probably know her better than anyone else and we are very open and candid with each other, there is some stuff where I still need to be like "You need to talk to one of your girlfriends about this." I'm simply never going to have very useful input on things like the specific hormonal and emotional experiences of being a mom, of menses, of the specific ways in which career or friendship advice I might have based on my experiences as a man simply don't work as well for her as a woman. I can try, but I am only ever going to be able to approach a lot of these things on an "academic" level instead of one that speaks from real, lived experience. People with the lived experience will simply be able to connect on it more intuitively and naturally than I could.
This is kind of what people are trying to get at when they say "believe women" or "White people need to sit back and listen when POC are talking." It gets weaponized by attention seekers and abusive personalities to imply you literally are not allowed to have your own perspective on things, but in the sensible interpretation, it's just saying you're used to seeing your experience as the default, but just be humble and understand that some stuff you're just not going to get as intuitively as others."
Because it is extremely valuable to have friends, allies, partners, and coconspiratiors. I can tell you from personal experience that you will never find anyone who is exactly like you. I have yet...
Because it is extremely valuable to have friends, allies, partners, and coconspiratiors.
I can tell you from personal experience that you will never find anyone who is exactly like you. I have yet to find anyone like myself.
I like this quote from the article (about seminars): It's important to have these discussions even if they are frustrating.
it's hard to see the discussion going well
I like this quote from the article (about seminars):
The first day, you will be frustrated. The second and the third day, you will be frustrated. Even on the last day, you will be frustrated, though ideally now in a different way. (...)
Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.
It's important to have these discussions even if they are frustrating.
I'm really struggling with how best to phrase my thoughts on this piece and on the magazine itself. First and foremost I think it's important to point out that the behavior described in the...
I'm really struggling with how best to phrase my thoughts on this piece and on the magazine itself.
First and foremost I think it's important to point out that the behavior described in the article is pretty transparently disgusting. So much so that I wonder how much has been shaped by the professors negative experience- he spends a lot of time talking about the students eyes and what he saw in them, but that also seems to be the only way he describes their behavior, outside of commenting on how much they decide to speak up.
I decided to research a little about the magazine and look at where this article is being shared online, and it's hard to gather much given the magazine is so new, but there's what appears to be a political slant, which makes me wonder how much input they had to the writing or editing process prior to this article being posted. I don't know enough about the professor to know what kind of stances they hold, but an article of this particular slant being posted on a politically charged magazine seems like a bad idea, especially for someone who understands anti racism.
I think at the end of the day I'm left with a lot more questions than answers. I believe everyone will agree that the behavior in the article is bad, but I'm left wondering a lot about how an article like this just happened to find itself where it was posted and how much can truly be trusted and where things were journalistically punched up and tweaked to try and paint anti racism as the enemy rather than rightfully looking to a problematic individual and a corruption of power. The click bait title, the fact the professor is an anti racist scholar, the way the article unfolds... It all just seems a little too orchestrated.
I think this article deserves a good faith reading. I know at the surface it looks like yet another right-wing "leftism gone amok" article (most of which are garbage) but this one reads different...
Exemplary
I think this article deserves a good faith reading. I know at the surface it looks like yet another right-wing "leftism gone amok" article (most of which are garbage) but this one reads different to me. I see it less as the right trying to get one over on the left but more of an example of where the left realizes the caller is coming from inside the house. I see it as similar to when Natalie Wynn or Lindsay Ellis faced their harassment campaigns. Those weren't a product of cross-political damage.
To me, the author isn't indicting anti-racism but is instead trying to capture the implosion of an academic space where everyone shared a common interest and goal. He pretty squarely puts the cause for that squeeze on Keisha, and I would love to hear her side of the story, but it's worth noting that neither he nor Keisha were necessarily in ideological opposition. It sounds like some of their beliefs are in alignment, and many of the author's criticisms were pedagogical in nature. Also, independent of the specific details of this particular case, I do feel like this article has a pulse on something larger, and something that we can discuss as it intersects with ourselves rather than the people in the article.
Look at how many people here, including both me and you, have approached this topic with significant discomfort. Also, in looking for that, we're only evaluating the ones we can see. How many people have refrained from commenting because they're worried about potential blowback? I still haven't made a top-level comment because I couldn't say what I wanted to say. I kept running into conceptual roadblocks and landmines -- places where I could see clearly the point I wanted to make but not how to convey it in a way that wouldn't open itself up to a negative scrutiny or outright disinterpretation.
The weight that crushed the group in the article can be felt here, and elsewhere too. It looks similar to the kind of social pressure that keeps the worst people out there from saying the absolute worst things. I think it's common for people like us especially to value that pressure. For example: if someone wandered onto this site and started spouting neo-Nazi shit, this site would unequivocally push back on that hard, and that's a very good thing. It affords people like us safety. That pressure is the bouncer at our digital bar, making sure that we can have a worry-free night.
This weight, the one we feel here and the one the author describes in the article, is different though. It keeps earnest people from saying earnest things. It prevents genuine questions from being genuine questions. It makes good people feel like they are bad people or, at the very least, that they might be mistaken for bad people should they accidentally trigger a trap they didn't even know was there. It's the night out at the bar, only everybody in the room is scared of the bouncer, worried about what he might do next, afraid that at any moment they could be his next target.
In an environment like this, nobody wins. People lose faith in themselves, in each other, and in the idea that we, together, have mutually held values and ideals. We're unwilling to be vulnerable because there's an obvious threat right there, so it's easier to keep our armor up and one eye out.
That, to me, is why I think this article is a good read and definitely a cut above all of the other regressive "anti-racism is the real racism!" stuff out there. What this article captures doesn't fit into the left vs. right, us vs. them binary. This article, to me, felt like us vs. us, and that's something I think deserves far more and deeper consideration than it gets.
To add onto this excellent comment, what I'm seeing as a missing piece of the puzzle is: What does that off-ramp look like? Say someone does some serious introspection and eventually concludes,...
Exemplary
To add onto this excellent comment, what I'm seeing as a missing piece of the puzzle is: What does that off-ramp look like? Say someone does some serious introspection and eventually concludes, "Okay, so maybe that's me. Maybe I'm the bouncer. In many, many situations I've participated in, I believe it's been the right thing to do. But I'll concede that maybe, during the times when the outside threat has died down, on those fortunate days, weeks, months, bouncer might not need to be the role I play any longer. So what then? What's the alternative for me?"
As others have noted, some iterations of the bouncer may have landed in that role by accident. Unlike the Keisha version of the bouncer, who seems to have chosen that role with a specific motive of spreading a message, or "indoctrination" as the author puts it—another person may be a bouncer because they happen to be good at it. Maybe they've been trained on the Internet for years to behave that way, and being the hero is what comes to them naturally. They receive immense praise and take great personal pride when they take down a perceived enemy or oppressor. They even make friends this way, as we all know what having a common enemy does for forming bonds.
Now, the following may be overly naive, but please humor me and save your eye-rolls during this thought experiment. What if we could boil down what the bouncer is really looking for, and give them another outlet for it? Say they say, "It's embarrassing to admit, but of course I want recognition. I want high standing in the community. I want to be liked and respected by the people I like and respect. I'm not seeking out enemies on purpose, but that's what comes naturally as a way to maintain all those things I listed, while enacting justice."
The important (and possibly too naive) part: Instead of finding a common enemy, what about a common work? By doing, one can earn recognition, respect, a high standing. By working together with others on a shared goal, one can form bonds, gain respect for others while earning mutual respect for themselves.
"What work? I'm not a programmer! I'm not interested in contributing to the Tildes code base! And Tildes is all about discussion; what does work have to do with anything?"
Sure. Fair points. But it's so easy to come up with a thousand excuses not to try. Maybe, try?
@kfwyre is the master of coming up with topic ideas, but it's unfair to wait for one person to do everything. Their "pop-up" series of topics are an amazing way of engaging the community on new activities, and they've encouraged others to start their own. Maybe try that?
Other random ideas:
Form a team to make something of interest to the Tildes community. A Best-of Tildes magazine? A TiMaSoMo past-and-present showcase?
Learn a game engine and make a Tildes video game starring Tildes users(Oh god this could go hilariously wrong scratch this)
Do some community service IRL, do a write-up about it, maybe photos, and make a guide to help others do the same in their IRL communities.
Design a Tildes T-shirt. Learn how to print and distribute it.
Learn a new skill, having nothing to do with Tildes. Teach it to us in a weekly format.
You get the idea. The point is, a community member may have some excess energy and want to use it for the good of the community. Maybe thinking outside the box—the box being this discussion forum format—and channeling energies toward doing something outside of the platform itself, could be meaningful?
Yeah, me. The only thing I feel truly comfortable contributing to the discussion is that I'm reminded of a post (or was it a comment chain?) on tildes about "academics are afraid to speak up" or...
How many people have refrained from commenting because they're worried about potential blowback?
Yeah, me.
The only thing I feel truly comfortable contributing to the discussion is that I'm reminded of a post (or was it a comment chain?) on tildes about "academics are afraid to speak up" or something of that nature. It's been a while, but I think I remember you were involved in that discussion too.
(Edit: I seriously didn't expect more than 1 vote for this comment. I'm unsure if this is other people like me anonymously joining in with "I'm not comfortable contributing" or anything else. Let me know in a DM or something.)
Oh absolutely. I think this is an important problem to address. The main thrust of my comment was that I suspect this was constructed or at least influenced in a way to really make it the...
an example of where the left realizes the caller is coming from inside the house
Oh absolutely. I think this is an important problem to address. The main thrust of my comment was that I suspect this was constructed or at least influenced in a way to really make it the "perfect" example for a certain set of individuals to point at and go "look, bad!" In short, I'm not sure the article, as it exists, is presented in good faith. Since the discussion in here had already touched on many of the salient points one should address from this article, I wanted to be sure to start a discussion on something that was an absent, yet important point.
I kept running into conceptual roadblocks and landmines -- places where I could see clearly the point I wanted to make but not how to convey it in a way that wouldn't open itself up to a negative scrutiny or outright disinterpretation.
And I think that's precisely the point I'm getting at- I can see how there's a lot missing from this article that I expect to see from journalism. I expect to see another person's point. I expect to see tempered language. I expect to see an attempt to empathize with others involved in the story when there's a conflict. I just don't see that in the article, and that troubles me. Was this constructed in a way so as to minimize the ability to criticize what happened? Is the only conclusion one is allowed to make is "yeah that's bad", because what's presented is objectively bad? If so, what are the implications of discussing it at all? Are we reinforcing beliefs which we might not hold by agreeing with the other side in this case? Are we prevented from having a discussion about nuance because we're worried about someone attacking the shaky ground on which we start the discussion?
at the very least, that they might be mistaken for bad people should they accidentally trigger a trap they didn't even know was there
Thank you for summarizing exactly how Keisha is exploiting the system presented in front of them. They know the system can be leveraged to paint people in a bad light, but it's more than just that. The system can act as a literal bouncer, ejecting people when it's appropriate. Keisha realizes this and also realizes they are in a position in which they can leverage the rules of the system to eject people by framing situations as in if they've crossed a clearly demarked line. However the line is obviously not demarked, it's shifted to meet whatever situation benefits Keisha and obfuscated through the use of complicated terminology.
This article, to me, felt like us vs. us, and that's something I think deserves far more and deeper consideration than it gets.
I would love to engage with that, but what I worry about is how this particular topic, presented in this fashion is also a room full of traps. I can see how this argument can easily devolve into many incorrect assumptions such as: this is just how leftists are, or this is what critical race theory does, or simple blatant racism against blacks. This context feels designed to be a trap by exploiting it's structure very much in the same way Keisha has been laying traps by exploiting the structure around them.
You’re suspicious, but I think this can all be explained. The author explained how he’s associated with Telluride and why he taught the seminar. The subject of the seminar was “Race and the Limits...
You’re suspicious, but I think this can all be explained.
The author explained how he’s associated with Telluride and why he taught the seminar. The subject of the seminar was “Race and the Limits of Law in America” which he seems very qualified to teach. It’s certainly not a coincidence that a Black professor who studies racial issues was there, given what the organization is like and what kind of seminar they wanted.
Presumably, deciding to write about what happened is something he did later. Deciding to write an article is intentional and publishing it in a particular magazine is intentional, but also pretty normal activities for a writer. (Keep in mind that we don’t know if it was his first choice.)
I did look into who publishes the magazine a little before posting, but ultimately, I think the article stands on its own. Whatever political slant there might be in other articles published in the same magazine shouldn’t be used to discredit this author’s story.
I doubt the author would agree to publish an article under his name, particularly one like this one, that doesn’t say what he wants to say. The background perspective and comparisons he makes, beyond just telling the story, seem better attributed to him than the magazine. (Editors do pick headlines, though, so if you don’t like the headline, that’s on them.)
If you’re wondering how I ran across it, it was on Marginal Revolution. It’s definitely not a coincidence that they’d link to an article like this one. I read the blog because sometimes they have good links, even though I disagree with a lot and some of it is pretty dubious.
So yeah, none of it is a coincidence, but the many reasons for why it all happened and how the article showed up here seem to all make sense.
Beyond how this story ended up being told, the other thing we might be suspicious of is whether it really happened the way he told it. Memory is fallible and people tell stories from their own point of view, and he’s not someone we know. But I don’t think there’s much to be done about that. Other people who were there might give their own perspectives someday, but it doesn’t seem serious enough to prompt a formal investigation.
Yeah I don't doubt it happened, what I wonder is how much has been distorted by a single point of view for the article and through a political editing process.
Yeah I don't doubt it happened, what I wonder is how much has been distorted by a single point of view for the article and through a political editing process.
I think this is an interesting case where the author believes the students are being indoctrinated by a figure of authority, so what they would have to say about it is cast in an unfortunately...
I think this is an interesting case where the author believes the students are being indoctrinated by a figure of authority, so what they would have to say about it is cast in an unfortunately skeptical light.
Seeing as there was a mention of the author's correspondence with a member(s?) of Telluride, notably on the topic of their broader view of the organization at large that summer, I would really love to see an article from such an individual.
Edit: I also wonder if this isn't a piece that could have found a home on an author's personal blog, or if I simply don't realize what a faux pas that might be in some segments of academia.
I find the choice of medium particularly odd. Honestly I think it's the most damning piece of evidence. This person is an anti racist scholar, they should be hyper aware of framing and avoid being...
I find the choice of medium particularly odd. Honestly I think it's the most damning piece of evidence. This person is an anti racist scholar, they should be hyper aware of framing and avoid being associated with or amplifying any questionable voices or associating with or promoting racist structures (whether said structures realize they are racist or not). I can't square this choice and the story with each other- it's the one piece of evidence which feels very contradictory.
This is all a fair criticism of the article (and its publisher), but the thing that strikes me more than anything: This style of discourse is pervasive online. It would follow that as students...
This is all a fair criticism of the article (and its publisher), but the thing that strikes me more than anything:
This style of discourse is pervasive online. It would follow that as students spend more time online their discourse styles bleed into real life. That tolerance and civility is insufficient, but acceptance is mandatory. I think it hurts causes more often than it helps, because it is alienating in a different way.
If I was a more eloquent writer, I'd probably work on an article titled "You can't ban your way to acceptance." You can mandate and enforce tolerance, but acceptance must be given freely.
And the discourse described by the author very much has that same mouthfeel, where its not good enough to be a supporter, but a true believer.
It never particularly struck me as pervasive online. I definitely see it, in certain circles, especially on platforms like Twitter where the platform encourages extremely short form quick, witty...
It never particularly struck me as pervasive online. I definitely see it, in certain circles, especially on platforms like Twitter where the platform encourages extremely short form quick, witty responses, rather than a deep discussion. I also see it in extremist circles, but that's just how brainwashing and cults work- conformity is encouraged and used to consolidate and wield power. I've also seen strong resistance to this in places that claim to be centrist or to promote discussion without recognition that they often promote a conformist environment because they allow vitriolic speech under the guise of fighting against conformity but end up creating one by pushing back too hard against any criticism.
There is definitely a discussion to be had in there about what tolerance and civility actually look like in practice. Is it tolerance or civility when you preach violence without actually practicing it in the moment? What about non physical forms of violence? Is it tolerance or civility to respond to this forcefully? Everything worth discussing is usually in the shades of gray between, but we need to be careful about people who know enough to take this stance but still use it to push an agenda without actually showing up to a discussion in good faith.
All the comments on this article are fantastic ❤, but I think what I have to say fits in best to this thread so I'll reply here. I think a big part of the issue with online discourse is that often...
All the comments on this article are fantastic ❤, but I think what I have to say fits in best to this thread so I'll reply here.
I think a big part of the issue with online discourse is that often it's with 'random' people that we don't have an established relationship with. I have friends I've known for a decade or more, and we can have conversations about 'controversial' or complex issues like racism, capitalism, whatever, because we are acting as critical friends. That baseline of trust, patience, and compassion is already established. By contrast, talking online through short text messages with pseudonymous people in a (semi-)public setting is a completely different environment, and that baseline often isn't there.
That said, I think there are (at least) two approaches. One is to ask, "how can we make online discussion more civil/... given that discussion partners don't always have those relationships?" Another is to ask, "how can we use the Internet to create new relationships with people, which can then serve as a basis for intimate discussions?" I'm more interested in this second question.
Violence is but a tool, and why and how it is used and advocated for/against is more important than anything. I somewhat despise the militant stance against violence, I see it a suppression tactic...
Violence is but a tool, and why and how it is used and advocated for/against is more important than anything. I somewhat despise the militant stance against violence, I see it a suppression tactic more than anything. Someone smarter than me said something akin to "If you want gun reform arm the black men."
But to get back to what I'm discussing. Tolerance and civility is eliminating systemic racism (ie not giving black people access to home loans). Acceptance is shaking hands with the first black family to move to town and treating them as any other neighbor.
The US has made a large bit of progress on the tolerance/civility bit, but far less progress on the acceptance bit. And sadly nothing but time (and continued civility/tolerance) will fix it.
It takes time for wounds to heal, and the scars will take generations. 1950something is not as far removed from our present as many would like to pretend it is.
To play Devil's Advocate, how are you able to ban your way to tolerance and yet not acceptance? How is the mechanism different? The saying could as easily be "You can ban violence but not hatred".
To play Devil's Advocate, how are you able to ban your way to tolerance and yet not acceptance? How is the mechanism different? The saying could as easily be "You can ban violence but not hatred".
The saying just as easily could be, yes. Dispelling hatred/gaining acceptance are two sides to the same coin, and no rule or law is going to solve it. At best, you can remove all barriers propped...
The saying just as easily could be, yes.
Dispelling hatred/gaining acceptance are two sides to the same coin, and no rule or law is going to solve it. At best, you can remove all barriers propped up by haters and prevent them erecting new ones.
For example Valve has gotten some not-completely-unfair criticism about how white their staff are, even relative to the rest of the industry. That Gabe, in response to "we should make more effort to hire minorities," replied "why?" I don't think he's completely in the wrong. If you're hiring exclusively people with senority from an industry that is just-recently starting to address its whiteness, it's going to take decades for that to 'trickle up' to senior-level positions, especially if there's little-to-no churn. Happened with women CEOs, it'll happen elsewhere, provided new barriers are not erected.
There is, especially online, an air of "conform or be ousted." That professor experienced it. And while its an almost neccesity online, where bad-faith actors are everywhere...it doesn't translate well to fostering acceptance.
I think the example given is good, but I disagree with your analysis. Because it's the right thing to do. If it's really true, as you suggest, that there simply are no non-white senior software...
I think the example given is good, but I disagree with your analysis.
That Gabe, in response to "we should make more effort to hire minorities," replied "why?"
Because it's the right thing to do. If it's really true, as you suggest, that there simply are no non-white senior software engineers in the US market (I heavily disagree with this, but let's assume it's true for the sake of argument), then their diversity efforts will fail, but those systems will exist when those people are available and they will have an easier time breaking into that environment. That is what "remov[ing] all barriers propped up by haters" looks like.
As another example, imagine that some company with a few thousand employees noticed they didn't have any LGBTQ+ employees. That's not congruent with demographics, so they might ask themselves why that's the case. In doing so, they might remove heteronormative language from office announcements and policies, build HR processes to handle name and gender changes, and so forth - and even if those LGBTQ+ people weren't available in the industry at that time, the company would be more welcoming to them when those candidates arrived.
Quoting my own stance for context. I think what you say does matter, broadly across society, yes. It is important to gather metrics and to see how demographics are balancing out once barriers are...
I don't think he's completely in the wrong.
Quoting my own stance for context. I think what you say does matter, broadly across society, yes. It is important to gather metrics and to see how demographics are balancing out once barriers are removed. However, when you compare Valve, you'll notice they're not some weird outlier in diversity despite spending little to no effort on it. I'll admit I don't trust my source 100% but then I'm not writing a research paper.
And all the things you discuss matter substantially more when you're accepting fresh faces straight out of college, rather than recruiting from senior levels. Or when your headcount is in the hundreds of thousands instead of < 1000.
Whilst there are good arguments for Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon to be extra mindful of representation, especially given their dominant nature in tech, I have trouble convincing myself that a company that is less than 1/10th the size of the population Microsoft alone laid off needs to spend extra effort trying to diversify itself. If that lack of diversity was truly a problem, a company like Epic would be able to disrupt Steam in short order.
At the end of the day, the barriers to starting a gaming company are about as low as it possibly can be. There are more systemic barriers to running a food truck than there are to starting a game company.
Most of the barriers to entering the gaming industry were gated behind availability of college education. The demographics have gotten better there in the last few decades, and we're seeing the effects of that now.
Any employee whom is qualified to work at Valve would be just as qualified to branch out on their own and create their own gaming company. That's ultimately why it doesn't bother me. Efforts at diversification are better spent earlier in the pipeline: insuring equal access to quality education, healthcare etc.
Can you elaborate upon why you think diversity drives a companies ability to disrupt? What barriers are there and how do they differ from starting a food truck? How is this relevant to someone...
If that lack of diversity was truly a problem, a company like Epic would be able to disrupt Steam in short order.
Can you elaborate upon why you think diversity drives a companies ability to disrupt?
At the end of the day, the barriers to starting a gaming company are about as low as it possibly can be. There are more systemic barriers to running a food truck than there are to starting a game company.
What barriers are there and how do they differ from starting a food truck? How is this relevant to someone looking to start a career, but not a company in the field?
The demographics have gotten better there in the last few decades, and we're seeing the effects of that now.
Efforts at diversification are better spent earlier in the pipeline: insuring equal access to quality education, healthcare etc.
Why do you think this is better? People exist in the world at all levels in the pipeline. For someone who's already completed education, how are they expected to thrive when their education was objectively worse, leading to lower scores on standardized tests and less likely admission to quality schools, less likely to land regular jobs in the fields they are interested in, etc.
I don't really want to get into it too much (as honestly getting in the weeds and not terribly well thought out in depth), but... To address the easy one....To make a game company, first make a...
I don't really want to get into it too much (as honestly getting in the weeds and not terribly well thought out in depth), but...
To address the easy one....To make a game company, first make a game people want to buy. Then gate a download link behind a "donate with paypal" button. Report income on taxes. Voila, you're a game company, fully legit. Admittedly, you're probably not going to make billions doing that exact tactic, but thats all it takes at a minimum. The hard part is really that first one, and that's gonna come down to your personal drive and ability to find people to work with, one which the onus is on oneself. By contrast... a food truck will have you needing to cross paths with a hefty state bureaucracy in short order. In my town, I would need to apply for mercantile licenses, collect and distribute sales taxes. Attend mandatory food safety training courses and apply and maintain records with the health department. It's a lot of systemic barriers, most of which I agree with fwiw....I do prefer to not get food poisoning at restaurants.
Demographics for education are broadly getting better, at least in terms of graduation rates. I won't deny getting rid of affirmative action, especially at educational admissions, was probably a bad idea.
I see diversity as a symptom of a less-toxic workplace. Another symptom of a less-toxic workplace is quality work. As such, I suspect there's a lot of mix/match of people seeing the diversity as a cause of the quality rather than the less-toxicity. I don't personally think diversity is the silver-bullet for quality improvement the way it often gets pitched as.
Why do you think this is better? People exist in the world at all levels in the pipeline.
Because it is at the beginning when it matters most. There should absolutely be, unquestionably, a social safety net that lets people whom are at other stages of the pipeline re-enter and get a fair shake at thriving (hence why ageism is a problem on multiple levels). Education should never end. There should be more systems in place to give people opportunities to strike it on their own without fear of losing everything in the process. With these things (and a healthy dose of trustbusting), diversity problems in the workplace will sort themselves out over time, regardless of any individual company's efforts.
I had similar misgivings about the magazine, and it made me question a lot of things about the article. Even being as generous as possible to the professor and the article I, like you, thought it...
I had similar misgivings about the magazine, and it made me question a lot of things about the article. Even being as generous as possible to the professor and the article I, like you, thought it was probably unwise to publish in a magazine with the kind of editorial line as this one. When I was looking into the publication, it looks like the founding editors were "two religious conservative and a populist marxist" and the idea behind the publication was to "attack liberalism from the left and the right". I know that there are plenty of issues with liberalism, but illiberal thinkers on the left and the right both seem a little too eager to throw away the baby with the bathwater and embrace authoritarianism. In light of the magazine's editorial line, I was especially troubled with the coda to this article, where the professor muses that "belief in democracy had authorized abuse, and there was no way out [for the students]". This doesn't seem like a necessary conclusion in this case. Again, I don't want to dismiss the negative experience out of hand, and it's very easy to see where something like the professor describes could go terribly wrong, but that conclusion, along with the recommended content following the article and some of the other things surrounding it in this magazine really troubled me.
As you said, it's really hard to place a finger on any one thing being obviously out of place. But there's a sum all together that leaves a strange impression making me wonder the level of...
As you said, it's really hard to place a finger on any one thing being obviously out of place. But there's a sum all together that leaves a strange impression making me wonder the level of orchestration.
This story makes things a little more clear to me. Have you ever realized how hard it is to talk about racism in public forums? When it comes to that topic, people seem to be divided into three...
This story makes things a little more clear to me.
Have you ever realized how hard it is to talk about racism in public forums?
When it comes to that topic, people seem to be divided into three fairly distinct camps. There are 'academic types', the people who have read books about what racism looks like to today like Racism without Racists, How to be an Anti-Racist, or The New Jim Crow. On the other side, there are the people who wholesale refuse to interact with those ideas, let alone understand or accept them. The final group is made up of people who don't understand the thoughts and reasoning behind those ideas but endorse them nonetheless. This story, I believe, is about that third group.
The thing that makes racism so insiduous is that it's extremely amorphous. There are many lenses to look at it with and each one reveals a different form. So an academic view of it is crucial; we need to understand what it looks like in all of it's forms to stop it from harming people. But one thing we tend to forget is that it's not the only thing we have to worry about that acts the same way. Racism is, after all, just a subset of prejudice and bigotry; there are other ways to divide people into beloved and hated. And the problem with this complexity is that people are not going to want to hear all of these details; they just want easy answers. And so we get these moralistic dogma that gets spread to people instead of the full idea. Remember those three books I mentioned earlier? What's the chances you or anyone you know has actually read all three of them? It's really easy to think that you've got a good grip on these heavy subjects when in reality you're just barely skin deep.
I appreciate that this story doesn't paint these events as "liberalism run amok" like most of these stories tend to do. It seems fairly clear that everyone involved is doing what they think is right. But it's still rather unfortunate that these students will walk away without the in-depth understanding that the professor was trying to give them.
Surely there is a much larger group of people who simply understand racism through first or secondhand experience and didn’t need a book to have it explained to them no? IMO it’s really not...
When it comes to that topic, people seem to be divided into three fairly distinct camps. There are 'academic types', the people who have read books about what racism looks like to today like Racism without Racists, How to be an Anti-Racist, or The New Jim Crow. On the other side, there are the people who wholesale refuse to interact with those ideas, let alone understand or accept them. The final group is made up of people who don't understand the thoughts and reasoning behind those ideas but endorse them nonetheless.
Surely there is a much larger group of people who simply understand racism through first or secondhand experience and didn’t need a book to have it explained to them no? IMO it’s really not something you get if your only lens is academic. You kind of need to see it. The academic stuff can help make sense of it and give it a broader sense of context. But you really need to be someone, or be engaged with friends who have various experiences of these things. That’s what gives your book knowledge “texture” and in the absence of it you end up with really reductive and over-generalized ideas about these things.
I feel like an absolute fool for not writing about it, but yes, people with lived firsthand experience are meant to be in that first group. That was why I put the term in quotes to begin with -...
I feel like an absolute fool for not writing about it, but yes, people with lived firsthand experience are meant to be in that first group. That was why I put the term in quotes to begin with - because it wasn’t meant to be strictly academic.
I do agree with you that you need to see racism in order to understand it, but I think that a lot of people see racist thoughts and ideas these days and don’t realize it because they don’t have the perspective to understand why it would have any negative effects.
While it would be great if everyone on earth had friends of every possible background as friends so we could have an intimate understanding of their struggles, it’s not a realistic solution, and that’s why I was putting a little more hope on people educating themselves through trustworthy sources.
We also just don’t have great language to discuss the texture of these things. A lot of “micro-aggressions,” for example, are results or offshoots of general racial discrimination or othering. But...
I do agree with you that you need to see racism in order to understand it, but I think that a lot of people see racist thoughts and ideas these days and don’t realize it because they don’t have the perspective to understand why it would have any negative effects.
We also just don’t have great language to discuss the texture of these things. A lot of “micro-aggressions,” for example, are results or offshoots of general racial discrimination or othering. But the reason the word micro was prepended to it is because people understood that these actions do not rise to the level of “aggression”. Malice is not intended and offensiveness is context dependent.
It would make more sense to wrap these up as a specific kind of faux pas or lapse in etiquette. But the tendency to ratchet up claims of harm results in micro-aggressions being received and treated as actual aggression or racism. So instead of having an appropriate reaction of mild exasperation or a sideways look like you might give someone who farts in an elevator, people jump immediately to conflation with hurling racial slurs. I’ve been in a lot of situations where well-intentioned White people will jump in and make an issue out of mildly annoying or out of pocket actions in a way that just exacerbates problems rather than resolving them and just puts me in a position of having to do damage control later. It’s a kind of selfish way of centering their own views so they can frame themselves as a hero rather than just observing and being chill.
I've been trying to write out a top-level response to the article and have been unable to so far, but you hit on a big important piece of what's been bouncing around my mind. I say this as someone...
I've been trying to write out a top-level response to the article and have been unable to so far, but you hit on a big important piece of what's been bouncing around my mind.
I say this as someone who is very invested in social justice and in being on the left: it feels we often lose all sense of proportionality, especially when met with something we perceive as related to discrimination or oppression. Small slights or errors get linked to bigger and genuinely inexcusable harms, which we then meet with a severe response as if those small things are in fact the big things themselves. It's not that those small things aren't necessarily linked to larger issues -- it's that each small thing doesn't deserve a full indictment or redress. Our calibration for injustice is frankly useless if everything breaks the meter.
Furthermore, I feel like our toolset in response is limited. I think a lot of online behaviors that get promoted and encouraged are outright abusive in the real world. Blocking people you don't like is standard fare online, but an in-person blocking -- casting someone out of a social group and refusing to associate with or communicate with them, as happened in the article -- should be reserved for only the most severe cases, if at all. Calling out people "works" online but it's caustic to real-world interpersonal relationships. Refusing to work in good faith with someone who is choosing to work in good faith with you is cruel. Reducing people to their worst moments and refusing to acknowledge any of their human complexity or dignity is abusive. Asserting that people cannot be anything more than their worst moments or ever change from them is abusive.
And, most of all, magnifying minor behaviors into major behaviors for the purposes of making the person worthy of heavy pushback, criticism, redress, or outright malice is heavily abusive.
I understand why all of this happens and the background it comes from. I blame social media and regressive trolls for both creating and establishing the ongoing need for harsh severity in online spaces, but I feel like we're losing sight of real-world norms, and we're worse off for it.
I've felt the reverse more productive, in terms of 'actually affecting behavioral change.' It's resulted in blowups yes, but its amazing how much nicer it is when people are forced to choose...
Calling out people "works" online but it's caustic to real-world interpersonal relationships.
I've felt the reverse more productive, in terms of 'actually affecting behavioral change.'
It's resulted in blowups yes, but its amazing how much nicer it is when people are forced to choose between their toxic behavior or their relationships.
I will add, people often say that it's necessary to protect vulnerable communities from harm to be this hardline about it, but I feel like the vast majority of targets of this sort of behavior are...
And, most of all, magnifying minor behaviors into major behaviors for the purposes of making the person worthy of heavy pushback, criticism, redress, or outright malice is heavily abusive.
I will add, people often say that it's necessary to protect vulnerable communities from harm to be this hardline about it, but I feel like the vast majority of targets of this sort of behavior are members of these vulnerable communities. And, because they're vulnerable or marginalized, the communities they're being ostracized from by these kinds of hardline tactics may be critical sources of emotional support for them that they simply cannot get anywhere else.
The classic abuser trait is to isolate and cut the targets of their abuse off from other sources. One of the reasons abuse victims stay with their abusers is because they're isolated that way and find themselves having to justify the abuse (further harming themselves psychologically in the process) to cope. Whether by intention or just an emergent property of the social norms and interaction paradigms, I worry this is exactly what's happening with marginalized communities in these spaces. This article where he emphasized the reticence and shyness of the kids after going through Keisha's training really drove this point home for me.
In a lot of ways I'm surprised that other people, including the professor himself, are surprised by this. That is absolutely, emphatically not my way of saying "well obviously, wokeness is out of control" - I'm saying I don't think the underlying drivers are specifically related to leftism, or being woke, or even anti-racism at all, despite that all being important context for this example in isolation.
People are competitive. Socially, financially, often even physically. Competitiveness leads to advantage-seeking. Any form of power, tool, social standing, status, or resource available to one group but not others can and will be turned to a competitive advantage by at least some members of that group, at least some of the time.
None of that is inherently a good or a bad thing on its own, nor does it do anything to address the complex interplay of advantages and disadvantages experienced differently by each individual, group, and society, but I hope that as a starting point it's something most of us can agree on.
Every step beyond that becomes fuzzier and less well defined, but I think it's fairly uncontroversial to observe that a decently large percentage of people will accept advantages more or less uncritically if they're offered, and that some much smaller percentage of people will actively and aggressively seek out any available advantages, sometimes at the expense of others. This still doesn't need to tie to any specific situation, or cast any value judgment on whether a given advantage is or isn't fair, or necessary, or deserved, or being used in the interests of the greater good - it's just high level observation.
Bringing it back to the concrete, you have Telluride choosing to center black voices in what looks to be a genuine and positive attempt to correct for previous wrongs. You have the author, planning to make use of this platform in the interests of education and equality. You have Keisha, who chooses to take advantage of the status and insulation that the platform provides her in order to dominate the conversation and bolster her own social and academic standing, and to find and amplify her supporters - I don't think it's possible to know whether she does this cynically for her own ends, or entirely unknowingly, or knowingly but through a genuine belief that it's necessary. You have the students, swept along by a charismatic authority figure and captured by the sense of righteousness she provides them.
I know this is reductive, and deliberately so in some ways. But I really do think it all just boils down to power dynamics, and those dynamics can arise from genuinely well-intentioned and initially positive movements just as much as they can from purposefully exclusionary and damaging ones.
[Edit] Since this seems to have ended up at the top of a very controversial topic, I want to reiterate that I really am saying that I believe the issue of power dynamics and people misusing them is totally separate to underlying ideology. It's a problem that can exist regardless of the surrounding context, and doesn't necessarily imply anything about that context. I see the two things as orthogonal, and for me that means that trying to make inferences about the ideology based on the group dynamics, or vice versa, is often misleading and sometimes even dangerous.
I absolutely don't mean this as a "call out" of anyone else in the thread, even those I disagree with. I'm genuinely pleased to be in a place we can discuss something like this with nuance and consideration, especially where people clearly have differing opinions about it. It's just important to me that I'm clear about what I'm saying, and the limits around the conclusions I personally would draw from that.
A pet theory of mine is that the ultra-left is struggling with assuming a position of relative power in a few key niches: University campuses, certain city neighborhoods, branches of the media (if worth mentioning: not society as a whole). I recognize the MO of angrily shouting slogans from previous decades but the difference was that these calls came from a position of being genuinely oppressed and underrepresented. It used to be a way to compensate for a lack of a voice in higher up circles and it felt appropriate.
Now we have the same tone, the same tactic, but with the support of, say, university leadership. "Demands" that used to be symbolic and viewed in the context of not actually being achievable are now actually executed. Within hours. What used to be abstract criticism of the status-quo which could be examined and reflected upon is now made reality and nobody stops to check the practical ramifications.
Maybe some of these demands used to be ignored because of racism but a few might have had genuinely justifiable opposition. People like Keisha are too excited about finally enacting their agenda and do not bother to distinguish between the two.
I often think about the cycle of oppression where the oppressed become the oppressors:
The oppressed and the oppressors share the same society as well as the same tools, methodologies, and paradigms to oppress and to liberate, to fight — limited by their contemporary imagination. I observe that meaningful progress happens when new tools are innovated and introduced. The most famous is the innovation of peaceful civil disobedience in our political language, as deployed and normalized by Gandhi and King. Before the 1900s, violent disobedience was the common language, spoken in the form of rebellions, revolts, uprisings. Nowadays, we protest.
There are many dynamics at work in the professor's case. From my own personal experience, I've met narcissists and abusers who dress themselves in the language of righteousness because it allows them to dominate and abuse others and enjoy the thrill and ecstasy of power that they otherwise couldn't access. From the professor's description of her, Keisha seems to be such a person. The type is found among both activists (the derided Social Justice Warrior) and the religious (the scolding Fundamentalist).
But among the ultra-left, the tools they instinctively and unquestioningly deploy in their fight against racism are the ones their oppressors used and now are so familiar and seemingly obvious to them: discrimination (but in reverse), segregation, censure, ostracism, and so on.
I believe that this fundamentally drives the phenomenon of Horseshoe Theory: in the end, the far left and right are cast from the same steel.
Horseshoe theory was never meant to describe political attitudes. Horseshoe makes the classic mistake of confusing economic policy with social in an attempt to oversimplify and classify individuals. Perhaps most importantly, there's exceedingly little scientific study of horseshoe theory and what little is out there happens to fail to prove the horseshoe theory hypothesis.
You're correct to point out that there are bad apples in any group. I also think you are correct to note that discrimination is still discrimination, even when it's employed in fundamentally different ways (a point you recognize explicitly in your parenthetical explanation of discrimination). A far-left narcissist might hold very different beliefs and employ very different tools than a far-right narcissist, but ultimately they are both still narcissists. What this implies, however, is not that the far-left and far-right are similar to each other (an artifact of attempting to infer rather than deduce), but rather that narcissists are similar to each other.
This is spot on my friend. I have been thinking this for a long time but didn’t know if I could voice this without being labeled bigot or worse. A lot of these movements are indeed using the same weapons they declare that their oppressors are using, on both sides.
Yeeesh. I don’t want to draw too much from just one side of a story. I’m sure this Keisha has her own perspective on it. But this is pretty damning and it’s hard to read her behavior as anything other than a dark triad personality having found a framework for laundering abusive and self-serving behaviors as part of a fight for “justice.”
This quote really sums up how much intellectual harm has actually been done to these students.
You can feel his pain reading that. He went in hoping to train a cadre of thoughtful, activist leaders on a subject important to him. He instead got to watch them being thoroughly disillusioned. It’s hard to imagine what the upshot of even having such a jaundiced worldview like that is. It’s like being angry and miserable is the point. And the goal is just spread around this fatalism and anger and hopelessness as much as possible. There’s no hope for a better world here. It’s not a “progressive” worldview in the slightest. That sort of mentality of permanent siege and fearfulness of the world is a hallmark of being a reactionary.
The section on commitment to democracy enabling abuse I found interesting. It really stresses the point that democratic governance is really about norms and virtues, merely having the formal act of people voting on things isn’t really the meaningful thing that makes the system work or reach toward any sort of rational or just outcome. As in this case (and in the nation’s politics writ large) we’ve seen ways specific democratic norms have been gamed out to enable demagoguery and corruption. People are kind of aping the formalities and rituals of the thing without really caring about the thing.
(I'm reluctant to post this since it's hard to see the discussion going well, but it seems like a cautionary tale that should be shared. Maybe not generalized too broadly though? It's a story of a particular place and time.)
From the article:
Further evidence in case you wonder if he's really on the left: here's a book review he wrote.
This comment is not an invitation for debate. This comment is about emotions.
I am a black man that is profoundly leftist and anti-racist. I was a student at a university at the graduate level that was largely black, leftist, and anti-racist. I do not have the means or the inclination to evaluate the veracity of the facts in the article, but that would be a difficult read even if it was fiction. It reverberates so much with my memories of that period. I am, at this moment, scared to write this comment. I'm not writing this as a top comment because I'm scared of the responses it might bring. I do not want to debate something that brings so many sad and conflicted emotions. And that is a problem. Because I should debate it. Everyone should debate it.
There is such a thing as exhaustion from activism.
I'm not black but maybe I can relate a little bit? Because as an LGBT+ person, I used to engage in a lot of debates and discussions online. I haven't for a while, and a mere headline about me and my queer siblings is enough to make me just quickly move on and scroll to the next thing. I am just so tired and sick of it. I've become disillusioned that I will ever change anybody's minds about these things, especially online.
I no longer care to sacrifice my mental well-being. It's too much to ask of some people, but I just want to live my life in peace god dammit.
Edit: after hitting send I realise I may have missed the point entirely - I apologise
That's okay. It's okay to converse. I enjoyed reading you. I don't wanna debate, but we can talk ;)
Sorry, to clarify, you're saying your experiences in the academic setting were very similar to the piece?
Yes. But not nearly as bad.
It was a hard read, even for a white non American guy like me.
This is such a familiar tale. :/
And I feel like even on Tildes, we've had this discussion several times before. When it's not about this exact topic, it's about some other form of issue that rejects nuance.
In fact, we last had it less than a month ago.
Personal perspective...
Racism specifically in its simplest forms is an issue I've been lucky enough to not suffer from directly, but I've had my share of -ist shit to deal with and I tend to do what I think a lot of people do: generalize my experience to put myself in the shoes of others. I don't pretend to know, but I try to do my best. I fight for others as I would for myself; more if possible.
And I feel that exhaustion. I've long since stopped calling myself "leftist" despite strongly identifying with it. In fact, I stopped calling myself most things I did identify with in the past: Leftist, Atheist, Gamer, French, Activist, ... Between feeling like my life is more nuanced than bucketed, and feeling targeted for shit I do not adhere to, it's felt like the easiest way to stop having targets painted on my back. There are very, very few adjectives/groups I even apply to myself anymore.
Incidentally, not being part of those groups has allowed my viewpoints to evolve without feeling like I am betraying my core principles. When I stopped calling myself atheist, I found myself again as an agnostic. When I stopped trying to bucket my sexuality, I found that it was flexible and I didn't need to define it to be happy. When I stopped calling myself leftist, I found my political viewpoints were actually all over the place and I don't really care to have political opinions about things I haven't developed an understanding for.
People really, really want to bucket, though. "You're not on the left? You must be on the right, then". I don't know what it is; I think it's something about american politics that just did this. Maybe just the electoral system the US developed which means that you straight up have to vote "right" or "left". If one wing is pro-something, the other wing is anti-that-thing. And if you're anti-that-thing, you're on the other wing, PERIOD. The politicians themselves know this and the more experienced ones play it to their full advantage of course (in fact, Biden's latest speech to congress showcases this perfectly, many soundbites were had).
This... permeates to other countries. Back in my home country, I fear Marine Le Pen will win the next elections and there is nothing I can do about it. While not the sole cause, American left-wing extremism (or even not-so-extremism) has entirely played its role in that, driving people to online bubbles that welcome the "refugees without a political identity", for theirs has been rejected by the left. Those communities and bubbles slowly infiltrate other countries; fighting for issues that don't even apply to the new country they got translated into, but who cares, it's about emotions, not facts, so they grow.
Internet politics is a fucking battleground of marketing campaigns. So, remind me again, what the point is to call myself a "leftist"?
As an Indian American I feel this pretty hard as well. A lot of the political discourse in India is dominated by people who seem extremely conditioned by American political framings of majority/minority discourse. So much so that I’ve actually seen people unironically talk about the history of “Hindu supremacy” oppressing Muslim minorities in India with the same framing as White supremacy over indigenous and Black people in the US. It’s bizarre when Indian history was actually the opposite! Where the Hindus were the indigenous population that Muslim invaders attempted (and failed) to supplant.
Obviously that doesn’t mean it’s okay for Hindus to oppress Muslims now that the shoe is on the other foot, but it certainly doesn’t do much to advance communal harmony when the ostensibly “liberal” and “progressive” groups are telling outright lies and classing anyone pointing out these are lies as a bigot. But it’s like the narrative itself, and the imperative of reinforcing it, has become more important than just having an accurate understanding of how the world is.
I think part of how research works online may be to blame. I might have talked about it before, but in the days of library research if you wanted to learn something specific about a topic you had to become familiar with the general facts on the topic because your main sources were various books and encyclopedias articles. Encountering a broad survey of perspectives on specific issues was mostly inescapable unless you were specifically in an ideological reading group that was filtering you down to ideologically focused literature.
But when people google for all their research, they search for specific articles of evidence (not even arguments) about the subject without absorbing all the necessary context. You get these random snippets of claims off TikTok or Twitter or various memes from wherever. But it’s all caricatured and exaggerated forms of the core idea and if that’s your primary means of learning about history or philosophy or politics your ideas on how the world works will be a distorted, funhouse mirror view of reality.
It occurs to me that this is extremely similar to the concept that the next generation of LLMs is going to be trained on the regurgitated results of the previous generation's LLM and the quality of the output will decrease over time as AI output becomes its primary input as well.
In both cases, the main question is: How do you create (or even just identify) high quality content, and have the SNR increase over time, rather than decrease?
The AI equivalent of Mad Cow. Feeding itself its own brains.
What a horribly evocative analogy. Well done!
You’d need really good curation and conditioning of your training data, but at that point you’re just hiring a subject matter expert on the issue of interest anyway and might as well have them write it.
I appreciate your view, and I agree with you to a point. People should come to ideas and join groups based on them. They shouldn’t adopt ideas with the purpose of joining a group. That’s just plain backwards. I would much rather have allies who agree with me because they understand and agree with my ideas, and not people who agree with my ideas just to fit in with the people around me.
But I don’t think that it’s pointless to give yourself these labels because those are the means with which you attract the people who think like you, so it is still a useful tool.
Why would I want to attract people like me, though?
Variety is how we create; otherwise we do exactly what @Naravara mentions above: regurgitate until our output is a digestion of a digestion.
This thread has really inspired me to write about this. I think I will try to share something in the coming days.
They will need to be like you along certain dimensions though, just so when you do disagree there is a given set of shared values, experiences, and assumptions you're coming in with.
For example, if I'm interested in discussion personal religious matters I want to talk to other Hindus. I don't want to be in generic "religion" spaces that are mostly populated with Christians and Muslims because they're coming from a completely different paradigm for how to understand these things. If you're LGBTQ you don't want to spend all your time retreading the foundational basics, you want to be able to go deep or vent or talk about things with people who get the foundational concepts and shared experiences to be able to do more than just skim the surface of your frustrations with you.
I've been with my wife for over 10 years now, and while I probably know her better than anyone else and we are very open and candid with each other, there is some stuff where I still need to be like "You need to talk to one of your girlfriends about this." I'm simply never going to have very useful input on things like the specific hormonal and emotional experiences of being a mom, of menses, of the specific ways in which career or friendship advice I might have based on my experiences as a man simply don't work as well for her as a woman. I can try, but I am only ever going to be able to approach a lot of these things on an "academic" level instead of one that speaks from real, lived experience. People with the lived experience will simply be able to connect on it more intuitively and naturally than I could.
This is kind of what people are trying to get at when they say "believe women" or "White people need to sit back and listen when POC are talking." It gets weaponized by attention seekers and abusive personalities to imply you literally are not allowed to have your own perspective on things, but in the sensible interpretation, it's just saying you're used to seeing your experience as the default, but just be humble and understand that some stuff you're just not going to get as intuitively as others."
Because it is extremely valuable to have friends, allies, partners, and coconspiratiors.
I can tell you from personal experience that you will never find anyone who is exactly like you. I have yet to find anyone like myself.
And I look forward to your thoughts!
I like this quote from the article (about seminars):
It's important to have these discussions even if they are frustrating.
I'm really struggling with how best to phrase my thoughts on this piece and on the magazine itself.
First and foremost I think it's important to point out that the behavior described in the article is pretty transparently disgusting. So much so that I wonder how much has been shaped by the professors negative experience- he spends a lot of time talking about the students eyes and what he saw in them, but that also seems to be the only way he describes their behavior, outside of commenting on how much they decide to speak up.
I decided to research a little about the magazine and look at where this article is being shared online, and it's hard to gather much given the magazine is so new, but there's what appears to be a political slant, which makes me wonder how much input they had to the writing or editing process prior to this article being posted. I don't know enough about the professor to know what kind of stances they hold, but an article of this particular slant being posted on a politically charged magazine seems like a bad idea, especially for someone who understands anti racism.
I think at the end of the day I'm left with a lot more questions than answers. I believe everyone will agree that the behavior in the article is bad, but I'm left wondering a lot about how an article like this just happened to find itself where it was posted and how much can truly be trusted and where things were journalistically punched up and tweaked to try and paint anti racism as the enemy rather than rightfully looking to a problematic individual and a corruption of power. The click bait title, the fact the professor is an anti racist scholar, the way the article unfolds... It all just seems a little too orchestrated.
I think this article deserves a good faith reading. I know at the surface it looks like yet another right-wing "leftism gone amok" article (most of which are garbage) but this one reads different to me. I see it less as the right trying to get one over on the left but more of an example of where the left realizes the caller is coming from inside the house. I see it as similar to when Natalie Wynn or Lindsay Ellis faced their harassment campaigns. Those weren't a product of cross-political damage.
To me, the author isn't indicting anti-racism but is instead trying to capture the implosion of an academic space where everyone shared a common interest and goal. He pretty squarely puts the cause for that squeeze on Keisha, and I would love to hear her side of the story, but it's worth noting that neither he nor Keisha were necessarily in ideological opposition. It sounds like some of their beliefs are in alignment, and many of the author's criticisms were pedagogical in nature. Also, independent of the specific details of this particular case, I do feel like this article has a pulse on something larger, and something that we can discuss as it intersects with ourselves rather than the people in the article.
Look at how many people here, including both me and you, have approached this topic with significant discomfort. Also, in looking for that, we're only evaluating the ones we can see. How many people have refrained from commenting because they're worried about potential blowback? I still haven't made a top-level comment because I couldn't say what I wanted to say. I kept running into conceptual roadblocks and landmines -- places where I could see clearly the point I wanted to make but not how to convey it in a way that wouldn't open itself up to a negative scrutiny or outright disinterpretation.
The weight that crushed the group in the article can be felt here, and elsewhere too. It looks similar to the kind of social pressure that keeps the worst people out there from saying the absolute worst things. I think it's common for people like us especially to value that pressure. For example: if someone wandered onto this site and started spouting neo-Nazi shit, this site would unequivocally push back on that hard, and that's a very good thing. It affords people like us safety. That pressure is the bouncer at our digital bar, making sure that we can have a worry-free night.
This weight, the one we feel here and the one the author describes in the article, is different though. It keeps earnest people from saying earnest things. It prevents genuine questions from being genuine questions. It makes good people feel like they are bad people or, at the very least, that they might be mistaken for bad people should they accidentally trigger a trap they didn't even know was there. It's the night out at the bar, only everybody in the room is scared of the bouncer, worried about what he might do next, afraid that at any moment they could be his next target.
In an environment like this, nobody wins. People lose faith in themselves, in each other, and in the idea that we, together, have mutually held values and ideals. We're unwilling to be vulnerable because there's an obvious threat right there, so it's easier to keep our armor up and one eye out.
That, to me, is why I think this article is a good read and definitely a cut above all of the other regressive "anti-racism is the real racism!" stuff out there. What this article captures doesn't fit into the left vs. right, us vs. them binary. This article, to me, felt like us vs. us, and that's something I think deserves far more and deeper consideration than it gets.
To add onto this excellent comment, what I'm seeing as a missing piece of the puzzle is: What does that off-ramp look like? Say someone does some serious introspection and eventually concludes, "Okay, so maybe that's me. Maybe I'm the bouncer. In many, many situations I've participated in, I believe it's been the right thing to do. But I'll concede that maybe, during the times when the outside threat has died down, on those fortunate days, weeks, months, bouncer might not need to be the role I play any longer. So what then? What's the alternative for me?"
As others have noted, some iterations of the bouncer may have landed in that role by accident. Unlike the Keisha version of the bouncer, who seems to have chosen that role with a specific motive of spreading a message, or "indoctrination" as the author puts it—another person may be a bouncer because they happen to be good at it. Maybe they've been trained on the Internet for years to behave that way, and being the hero is what comes to them naturally. They receive immense praise and take great personal pride when they take down a perceived enemy or oppressor. They even make friends this way, as we all know what having a common enemy does for forming bonds.
Now, the following may be overly naive, but please humor me and save your eye-rolls during this thought experiment. What if we could boil down what the bouncer is really looking for, and give them another outlet for it? Say they say, "It's embarrassing to admit, but of course I want recognition. I want high standing in the community. I want to be liked and respected by the people I like and respect. I'm not seeking out enemies on purpose, but that's what comes naturally as a way to maintain all those things I listed, while enacting justice."
The important (and possibly too naive) part: Instead of finding a common enemy, what about a common work? By doing, one can earn recognition, respect, a high standing. By working together with others on a shared goal, one can form bonds, gain respect for others while earning mutual respect for themselves.
"What work? I'm not a programmer! I'm not interested in contributing to the Tildes code base! And Tildes is all about discussion; what does work have to do with anything?"
Sure. Fair points. But it's so easy to come up with a thousand excuses not to try. Maybe, try?
@kfwyre is the master of coming up with topic ideas, but it's unfair to wait for one person to do everything. Their "pop-up" series of topics are an amazing way of engaging the community on new activities, and they've encouraged others to start their own. Maybe try that?
Other random ideas:
Form a team to make something of interest to the Tildes community. A Best-of Tildes magazine? A TiMaSoMo past-and-present showcase?
Learn a game engine and make a
Tildes video game starring Tildes users(Oh god this could go hilariously wrong scratch this)Do some community service IRL, do a write-up about it, maybe photos, and make a guide to help others do the same in their IRL communities.
Design a Tildes T-shirt. Learn how to print and distribute it.
Learn a new skill, having nothing to do with Tildes. Teach it to us in a weekly format.
You get the idea. The point is, a community member may have some excess energy and want to use it for the good of the community. Maybe thinking outside the box—the box being this discussion forum format—and channeling energies toward doing something outside of the platform itself, could be meaningful?
Yeah, me.
The only thing I feel truly comfortable contributing to the discussion is that I'm reminded of a post (or was it a comment chain?) on tildes about "academics are afraid to speak up" or something of that nature. It's been a while, but I think I remember you were involved in that discussion too.
(Edit: I seriously didn't expect more than 1 vote for this comment. I'm unsure if this is other people like me anonymously joining in with "I'm not comfortable contributing" or anything else. Let me know in a DM or something.)
Oh absolutely. I think this is an important problem to address. The main thrust of my comment was that I suspect this was constructed or at least influenced in a way to really make it the "perfect" example for a certain set of individuals to point at and go "look, bad!" In short, I'm not sure the article, as it exists, is presented in good faith. Since the discussion in here had already touched on many of the salient points one should address from this article, I wanted to be sure to start a discussion on something that was an absent, yet important point.
And I think that's precisely the point I'm getting at- I can see how there's a lot missing from this article that I expect to see from journalism. I expect to see another person's point. I expect to see tempered language. I expect to see an attempt to empathize with others involved in the story when there's a conflict. I just don't see that in the article, and that troubles me. Was this constructed in a way so as to minimize the ability to criticize what happened? Is the only conclusion one is allowed to make is "yeah that's bad", because what's presented is objectively bad? If so, what are the implications of discussing it at all? Are we reinforcing beliefs which we might not hold by agreeing with the other side in this case? Are we prevented from having a discussion about nuance because we're worried about someone attacking the shaky ground on which we start the discussion?
Thank you for summarizing exactly how Keisha is exploiting the system presented in front of them. They know the system can be leveraged to paint people in a bad light, but it's more than just that. The system can act as a literal bouncer, ejecting people when it's appropriate. Keisha realizes this and also realizes they are in a position in which they can leverage the rules of the system to eject people by framing situations as in if they've crossed a clearly demarked line. However the line is obviously not demarked, it's shifted to meet whatever situation benefits Keisha and obfuscated through the use of complicated terminology.
I would love to engage with that, but what I worry about is how this particular topic, presented in this fashion is also a room full of traps. I can see how this argument can easily devolve into many incorrect assumptions such as: this is just how leftists are, or this is what critical race theory does, or simple blatant racism against blacks. This context feels designed to be a trap by exploiting it's structure very much in the same way Keisha has been laying traps by exploiting the structure around them.
You’re suspicious, but I think this can all be explained.
The author explained how he’s associated with Telluride and why he taught the seminar. The subject of the seminar was “Race and the Limits of Law in America” which he seems very qualified to teach. It’s certainly not a coincidence that a Black professor who studies racial issues was there, given what the organization is like and what kind of seminar they wanted.
Presumably, deciding to write about what happened is something he did later. Deciding to write an article is intentional and publishing it in a particular magazine is intentional, but also pretty normal activities for a writer. (Keep in mind that we don’t know if it was his first choice.)
I did look into who publishes the magazine a little before posting, but ultimately, I think the article stands on its own. Whatever political slant there might be in other articles published in the same magazine shouldn’t be used to discredit this author’s story.
I doubt the author would agree to publish an article under his name, particularly one like this one, that doesn’t say what he wants to say. The background perspective and comparisons he makes, beyond just telling the story, seem better attributed to him than the magazine. (Editors do pick headlines, though, so if you don’t like the headline, that’s on them.)
If you’re wondering how I ran across it, it was on Marginal Revolution. It’s definitely not a coincidence that they’d link to an article like this one. I read the blog because sometimes they have good links, even though I disagree with a lot and some of it is pretty dubious.
So yeah, none of it is a coincidence, but the many reasons for why it all happened and how the article showed up here seem to all make sense.
Beyond how this story ended up being told, the other thing we might be suspicious of is whether it really happened the way he told it. Memory is fallible and people tell stories from their own point of view, and he’s not someone we know. But I don’t think there’s much to be done about that. Other people who were there might give their own perspectives someday, but it doesn’t seem serious enough to prompt a formal investigation.
Yeah I don't doubt it happened, what I wonder is how much has been distorted by a single point of view for the article and through a political editing process.
I think this is an interesting case where the author believes the students are being indoctrinated by a figure of authority, so what they would have to say about it is cast in an unfortunately skeptical light.
Seeing as there was a mention of the author's correspondence with a member(s?) of Telluride, notably on the topic of their broader view of the organization at large that summer, I would really love to see an article from such an individual.
Edit: I also wonder if this isn't a piece that could have found a home on an author's personal blog, or if I simply don't realize what a faux pas that might be in some segments of academia.
I find the choice of medium particularly odd. Honestly I think it's the most damning piece of evidence. This person is an anti racist scholar, they should be hyper aware of framing and avoid being associated with or amplifying any questionable voices or associating with or promoting racist structures (whether said structures realize they are racist or not). I can't square this choice and the story with each other- it's the one piece of evidence which feels very contradictory.
This is all a fair criticism of the article (and its publisher), but the thing that strikes me more than anything:
This style of discourse is pervasive online. It would follow that as students spend more time online their discourse styles bleed into real life. That tolerance and civility is insufficient, but acceptance is mandatory. I think it hurts causes more often than it helps, because it is alienating in a different way.
If I was a more eloquent writer, I'd probably work on an article titled "You can't ban your way to acceptance." You can mandate and enforce tolerance, but acceptance must be given freely.
And the discourse described by the author very much has that same mouthfeel, where its not good enough to be a supporter, but a true believer.
It never particularly struck me as pervasive online. I definitely see it, in certain circles, especially on platforms like Twitter where the platform encourages extremely short form quick, witty responses, rather than a deep discussion. I also see it in extremist circles, but that's just how brainwashing and cults work- conformity is encouraged and used to consolidate and wield power. I've also seen strong resistance to this in places that claim to be centrist or to promote discussion without recognition that they often promote a conformist environment because they allow vitriolic speech under the guise of fighting against conformity but end up creating one by pushing back too hard against any criticism.
There is definitely a discussion to be had in there about what tolerance and civility actually look like in practice. Is it tolerance or civility when you preach violence without actually practicing it in the moment? What about non physical forms of violence? Is it tolerance or civility to respond to this forcefully? Everything worth discussing is usually in the shades of gray between, but we need to be careful about people who know enough to take this stance but still use it to push an agenda without actually showing up to a discussion in good faith.
All the comments on this article are fantastic ❤, but I think what I have to say fits in best to this thread so I'll reply here.
I think a big part of the issue with online discourse is that often it's with 'random' people that we don't have an established relationship with. I have friends I've known for a decade or more, and we can have conversations about 'controversial' or complex issues like racism, capitalism, whatever, because we are acting as critical friends. That baseline of trust, patience, and compassion is already established. By contrast, talking online through short text messages with pseudonymous people in a (semi-)public setting is a completely different environment, and that baseline often isn't there.
That said, I think there are (at least) two approaches. One is to ask, "how can we make online discussion more civil/... given that discussion partners don't always have those relationships?" Another is to ask, "how can we use the Internet to create new relationships with people, which can then serve as a basis for intimate discussions?" I'm more interested in this second question.
Violence is but a tool, and why and how it is used and advocated for/against is more important than anything. I somewhat despise the militant stance against violence, I see it a suppression tactic more than anything. Someone smarter than me said something akin to "If you want gun reform arm the black men."
But to get back to what I'm discussing. Tolerance and civility is eliminating systemic racism (ie not giving black people access to home loans). Acceptance is shaking hands with the first black family to move to town and treating them as any other neighbor.
The US has made a large bit of progress on the tolerance/civility bit, but far less progress on the acceptance bit. And sadly nothing but time (and continued civility/tolerance) will fix it.
It takes time for wounds to heal, and the scars will take generations. 1950something is not as far removed from our present as many would like to pretend it is.
To play Devil's Advocate, how are you able to ban your way to tolerance and yet not acceptance? How is the mechanism different? The saying could as easily be "You can ban violence but not hatred".
The saying just as easily could be, yes.
Dispelling hatred/gaining acceptance are two sides to the same coin, and no rule or law is going to solve it. At best, you can remove all barriers propped up by haters and prevent them erecting new ones.
For example Valve has gotten some not-completely-unfair criticism about how white their staff are, even relative to the rest of the industry. That Gabe, in response to "we should make more effort to hire minorities," replied "why?" I don't think he's completely in the wrong. If you're hiring exclusively people with senority from an industry that is just-recently starting to address its whiteness, it's going to take decades for that to 'trickle up' to senior-level positions, especially if there's little-to-no churn. Happened with women CEOs, it'll happen elsewhere, provided new barriers are not erected.
There is, especially online, an air of "conform or be ousted." That professor experienced it. And while its an almost neccesity online, where bad-faith actors are everywhere...it doesn't translate well to fostering acceptance.
I think the example given is good, but I disagree with your analysis.
Because it's the right thing to do. If it's really true, as you suggest, that there simply are no non-white senior software engineers in the US market (I heavily disagree with this, but let's assume it's true for the sake of argument), then their diversity efforts will fail, but those systems will exist when those people are available and they will have an easier time breaking into that environment. That is what "remov[ing] all barriers propped up by haters" looks like.
As another example, imagine that some company with a few thousand employees noticed they didn't have any LGBTQ+ employees. That's not congruent with demographics, so they might ask themselves why that's the case. In doing so, they might remove heteronormative language from office announcements and policies, build HR processes to handle name and gender changes, and so forth - and even if those LGBTQ+ people weren't available in the industry at that time, the company would be more welcoming to them when those candidates arrived.
Quoting my own stance for context. I think what you say does matter, broadly across society, yes. It is important to gather metrics and to see how demographics are balancing out once barriers are removed. However, when you compare Valve, you'll notice they're not some weird outlier in diversity despite spending little to no effort on it. I'll admit I don't trust my source 100% but then I'm not writing a research paper.
Valve, Microsoft, Bungie, Apple, ActiBliz, Google, Amazon, Epic.
And all the things you discuss matter substantially more when you're accepting fresh faces straight out of college, rather than recruiting from senior levels. Or when your headcount is in the hundreds of thousands instead of < 1000.
Whilst there are good arguments for Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon to be extra mindful of representation, especially given their dominant nature in tech, I have trouble convincing myself that a company that is less than 1/10th the size of the population Microsoft alone laid off needs to spend extra effort trying to diversify itself. If that lack of diversity was truly a problem, a company like Epic would be able to disrupt Steam in short order.
At the end of the day, the barriers to starting a gaming company are about as low as it possibly can be. There are more systemic barriers to running a food truck than there are to starting a game company.
Most of the barriers to entering the gaming industry were gated behind availability of college education. The demographics have gotten better there in the last few decades, and we're seeing the effects of that now.
Any employee whom is qualified to work at Valve would be just as qualified to branch out on their own and create their own gaming company. That's ultimately why it doesn't bother me. Efforts at diversification are better spent earlier in the pipeline: insuring equal access to quality education, healthcare etc.
Can you elaborate upon why you think diversity drives a companies ability to disrupt?
What barriers are there and how do they differ from starting a food truck? How is this relevant to someone looking to start a career, but not a company in the field?
I'm not so certain this is true
Why do you think this is better? People exist in the world at all levels in the pipeline. For someone who's already completed education, how are they expected to thrive when their education was objectively worse, leading to lower scores on standardized tests and less likely admission to quality schools, less likely to land regular jobs in the fields they are interested in, etc.
I don't really want to get into it too much (as honestly getting in the weeds and not terribly well thought out in depth), but...
To address the easy one....To make a game company, first make a game people want to buy. Then gate a download link behind a "donate with paypal" button. Report income on taxes. Voila, you're a game company, fully legit. Admittedly, you're probably not going to make billions doing that exact tactic, but thats all it takes at a minimum. The hard part is really that first one, and that's gonna come down to your personal drive and ability to find people to work with, one which the onus is on oneself. By contrast... a food truck will have you needing to cross paths with a hefty state bureaucracy in short order. In my town, I would need to apply for mercantile licenses, collect and distribute sales taxes. Attend mandatory food safety training courses and apply and maintain records with the health department. It's a lot of systemic barriers, most of which I agree with fwiw....I do prefer to not get food poisoning at restaurants.
Demographics for education are broadly getting better, at least in terms of graduation rates. I won't deny getting rid of affirmative action, especially at educational admissions, was probably a bad idea.
I see diversity as a symptom of a less-toxic workplace. Another symptom of a less-toxic workplace is quality work. As such, I suspect there's a lot of mix/match of people seeing the diversity as a cause of the quality rather than the less-toxicity. I don't personally think diversity is the silver-bullet for quality improvement the way it often gets pitched as.
Because it is at the beginning when it matters most. There should absolutely be, unquestionably, a social safety net that lets people whom are at other stages of the pipeline re-enter and get a fair shake at thriving (hence why ageism is a problem on multiple levels). Education should never end. There should be more systems in place to give people opportunities to strike it on their own without fear of losing everything in the process. With these things (and a healthy dose of trustbusting), diversity problems in the workplace will sort themselves out over time, regardless of any individual company's efforts.
I had similar misgivings about the magazine, and it made me question a lot of things about the article. Even being as generous as possible to the professor and the article I, like you, thought it was probably unwise to publish in a magazine with the kind of editorial line as this one. When I was looking into the publication, it looks like the founding editors were "two religious conservative and a populist marxist" and the idea behind the publication was to "attack liberalism from the left and the right". I know that there are plenty of issues with liberalism, but illiberal thinkers on the left and the right both seem a little too eager to throw away the baby with the bathwater and embrace authoritarianism. In light of the magazine's editorial line, I was especially troubled with the coda to this article, where the professor muses that "belief in democracy had authorized abuse, and there was no way out [for the students]". This doesn't seem like a necessary conclusion in this case. Again, I don't want to dismiss the negative experience out of hand, and it's very easy to see where something like the professor describes could go terribly wrong, but that conclusion, along with the recommended content following the article and some of the other things surrounding it in this magazine really troubled me.
As you said, it's really hard to place a finger on any one thing being obviously out of place. But there's a sum all together that leaves a strange impression making me wonder the level of orchestration.
This story makes things a little more clear to me.
Have you ever realized how hard it is to talk about racism in public forums?
When it comes to that topic, people seem to be divided into three fairly distinct camps. There are 'academic types', the people who have read books about what racism looks like to today like Racism without Racists, How to be an Anti-Racist, or The New Jim Crow. On the other side, there are the people who wholesale refuse to interact with those ideas, let alone understand or accept them. The final group is made up of people who don't understand the thoughts and reasoning behind those ideas but endorse them nonetheless. This story, I believe, is about that third group.
The thing that makes racism so insiduous is that it's extremely amorphous. There are many lenses to look at it with and each one reveals a different form. So an academic view of it is crucial; we need to understand what it looks like in all of it's forms to stop it from harming people. But one thing we tend to forget is that it's not the only thing we have to worry about that acts the same way. Racism is, after all, just a subset of prejudice and bigotry; there are other ways to divide people into beloved and hated. And the problem with this complexity is that people are not going to want to hear all of these details; they just want easy answers. And so we get these moralistic dogma that gets spread to people instead of the full idea. Remember those three books I mentioned earlier? What's the chances you or anyone you know has actually read all three of them? It's really easy to think that you've got a good grip on these heavy subjects when in reality you're just barely skin deep.
I appreciate that this story doesn't paint these events as "liberalism run amok" like most of these stories tend to do. It seems fairly clear that everyone involved is doing what they think is right. But it's still rather unfortunate that these students will walk away without the in-depth understanding that the professor was trying to give them.
Surely there is a much larger group of people who simply understand racism through first or secondhand experience and didn’t need a book to have it explained to them no? IMO it’s really not something you get if your only lens is academic. You kind of need to see it. The academic stuff can help make sense of it and give it a broader sense of context. But you really need to be someone, or be engaged with friends who have various experiences of these things. That’s what gives your book knowledge “texture” and in the absence of it you end up with really reductive and over-generalized ideas about these things.
I feel like an absolute fool for not writing about it, but yes, people with lived firsthand experience are meant to be in that first group. That was why I put the term in quotes to begin with - because it wasn’t meant to be strictly academic.
I do agree with you that you need to see racism in order to understand it, but I think that a lot of people see racist thoughts and ideas these days and don’t realize it because they don’t have the perspective to understand why it would have any negative effects.
While it would be great if everyone on earth had friends of every possible background as friends so we could have an intimate understanding of their struggles, it’s not a realistic solution, and that’s why I was putting a little more hope on people educating themselves through trustworthy sources.
We also just don’t have great language to discuss the texture of these things. A lot of “micro-aggressions,” for example, are results or offshoots of general racial discrimination or othering. But the reason the word micro was prepended to it is because people understood that these actions do not rise to the level of “aggression”. Malice is not intended and offensiveness is context dependent.
It would make more sense to wrap these up as a specific kind of faux pas or lapse in etiquette. But the tendency to ratchet up claims of harm results in micro-aggressions being received and treated as actual aggression or racism. So instead of having an appropriate reaction of mild exasperation or a sideways look like you might give someone who farts in an elevator, people jump immediately to conflation with hurling racial slurs. I’ve been in a lot of situations where well-intentioned White people will jump in and make an issue out of mildly annoying or out of pocket actions in a way that just exacerbates problems rather than resolving them and just puts me in a position of having to do damage control later. It’s a kind of selfish way of centering their own views so they can frame themselves as a hero rather than just observing and being chill.
I've been trying to write out a top-level response to the article and have been unable to so far, but you hit on a big important piece of what's been bouncing around my mind.
I say this as someone who is very invested in social justice and in being on the left: it feels we often lose all sense of proportionality, especially when met with something we perceive as related to discrimination or oppression. Small slights or errors get linked to bigger and genuinely inexcusable harms, which we then meet with a severe response as if those small things are in fact the big things themselves. It's not that those small things aren't necessarily linked to larger issues -- it's that each small thing doesn't deserve a full indictment or redress. Our calibration for injustice is frankly useless if everything breaks the meter.
Furthermore, I feel like our toolset in response is limited. I think a lot of online behaviors that get promoted and encouraged are outright abusive in the real world. Blocking people you don't like is standard fare online, but an in-person blocking -- casting someone out of a social group and refusing to associate with or communicate with them, as happened in the article -- should be reserved for only the most severe cases, if at all. Calling out people "works" online but it's caustic to real-world interpersonal relationships. Refusing to work in good faith with someone who is choosing to work in good faith with you is cruel. Reducing people to their worst moments and refusing to acknowledge any of their human complexity or dignity is abusive. Asserting that people cannot be anything more than their worst moments or ever change from them is abusive.
And, most of all, magnifying minor behaviors into major behaviors for the purposes of making the person worthy of heavy pushback, criticism, redress, or outright malice is heavily abusive.
I understand why all of this happens and the background it comes from. I blame social media and regressive trolls for both creating and establishing the ongoing need for harsh severity in online spaces, but I feel like we're losing sight of real-world norms, and we're worse off for it.
I've felt the reverse more productive, in terms of 'actually affecting behavioral change.'
It's resulted in blowups yes, but its amazing how much nicer it is when people are forced to choose between their toxic behavior or their relationships.
I will add, people often say that it's necessary to protect vulnerable communities from harm to be this hardline about it, but I feel like the vast majority of targets of this sort of behavior are members of these vulnerable communities. And, because they're vulnerable or marginalized, the communities they're being ostracized from by these kinds of hardline tactics may be critical sources of emotional support for them that they simply cannot get anywhere else.
The classic abuser trait is to isolate and cut the targets of their abuse off from other sources. One of the reasons abuse victims stay with their abusers is because they're isolated that way and find themselves having to justify the abuse (further harming themselves psychologically in the process) to cope. Whether by intention or just an emergent property of the social norms and interaction paradigms, I worry this is exactly what's happening with marginalized communities in these spaces. This article where he emphasized the reticence and shyness of the kids after going through Keisha's training really drove this point home for me.